Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

I move opposition requested amendment (R9) on sheet 7011:

(R9)   Schedule 1, item 1, page 15 (lines 27 to 29), omit paragraph 355-225(1)(a), substitute:

  (a)   expenditure of a capital nature that is incurred to acquire or construct:

     (i)   a building or a part of a building; or

     (ii)   an extension, alteration or improvement to a building;

     that is to be *held by the R&D entity;

The statement of reasons accompanying the request read as follows—

Amendments (R9) and (R10)

The effect of amendments (R9) and (R10) will be to allow tax deductions for expenditure that was not previously tax deductible as research and development expenditure. This too will increase amounts paid out under a refundable tax offset, which would be met from the standing appropriation in section 16 of the Taxation Administration Act 1953 , and the amendments are therefore presented as requests .

This is one of the areas that I spoke about during my speech in the second reading debate. The government was making claims about claims that were not verifiable. It is trying to limit industry's access to R&D. Yet those that were clearly outside that process were being investigated. We have also had discussions over the last week or so where the government says it is going to do one thing in one piece of legislation but its actions in another area actually operate in a different way. So you have in this bill, as we read it, that it makes changes to qualifying arrangements that only allow for claimants to receive assistance where R&D occurs away from the building site and we know, having discussed this at estimates, that there are circumstances where the R&D actually does occur on site. Yet the Green Building Fund processes assume that no additionality is required. So we have the circumstance in the Carbon Farming Initiative where the government was saying to us, under that piece of legislation, they wanted to protect agricultural land. Yet, in moving to lock up 430,000 or 572,000 hectares of forest in Tasmania, you are going to move the forest industry out onto the agricultural land in Tasmania, because you need 100,000 hectares of plantation to make up for the land that you are locking up under the other process. So you can forgive people for being confused about the government's approach in relation to these matters, where they say they want to do one thing in one piece of legislation and head off and do something completely different, and in fact the opposite, in another measure. It is on that basis that we believe that this amendment should be supported.